SBI Holdings has completed its roughly $290 million acquisition of Bitbank, making the exchange a wholly owned subsidiary as of October 1. Bitbank is one of Japan’s larger crypto exchanges and has long been a significant marketplace for XRP liquidity.
With the exchange now fully inside the SBI group after Bitbank bought back shares from MIXI and Ceres, the deal tightens SBI’s position around XRP trading infrastructure in Japan. SBI says it invested in Ripple in 2016, holds about 9% of the company, and set up SBI Ripple Asia that same year to expand cross-border payment services using Ripple technology and XRP.
On a simple combined basis using figures from the end of April 2026, SBI VC Trade and Bitbank together would hold about ¥1.1 trillion in customer crypto assets and around 2.92 million accounts. The result is one of Japan’s core XRP trading venues now sitting directly within the orbit of the country’s most established institutional XRP backer.